Sex Worker Voices

Eris Martinet is a professional dominatrix with years of experience. She blogs on issues of female domination, BDSM and the History of Kink. You can follow her at @ErisMartinet

Sex work is legal work. We all have to work to survive, it’s not a fancy, it’s because we like to live. Extravagant, I know. You CAN afford not to work, if you’re, like, born super wealthy; like the royals. But then, you have to pretend you’re earning your riches, and that’s work.

The thing is, we’re all put on this planet competing for resources and we have to work exponentially harder to survive despite the economy being so great it transformed the earth, you wonder where’s it all going to? And some, the wage people, now until their 70s? But I digress. The idea is one type of work or another is a choice between various types of compromises and unfair deals capitalism cuts you. I assume the upper class doesn’t read sex worker articles so I’m addressing the middle and lower class. It’s all coercive, in the larger frame. You may choose to labour in a bar, develop tendonitis for 6 pounds an hour, feel that leaves you wholesome and noble, even though the grinning lined up men at the bar tipping you every time they catch a glimpse of your bosom as you stretch for the top shelf whiskey — IS sex work, you’re just not paid sex worker money. I choose a form of sex work that makes me feel great. I choose higher pay per hour, being my own employer, and having men kiss my feet for 3/4 figures, and building my own image and brand, and deciding who I talk to and who I graciously shun.

​You say this is “prostitution”, and “whoredom”, and innately evil in ways that are so hard to detect they surely belong in the mythical realm. I acknowledge the accompanying stigmatizing factors that come with it. I just don’t care. You choose to labour in a strict hierarchy earning your crumbs and sitting in a cubicle 8 hours a day with 10 min lunch break, pretending to really like selling roof solutions; but you have the accompanying “respectability” of being a sales agent…I choose the comfort, beauty, and elation that come from femdom, …and the occasional combination of sounds that reach my inner ear that attempt to shame me: “whore”. Waves in the air. Life in a cage. Comfort and relative independence, free time, respect, beauty…versus rules, hollow tasks, order from above, and low wages. Yeah, I’ll choose sex work, thank you very much.

Sex work is manifold. It can mean direct sexual intercourse with bells and whistles, and it can mean tweeting a dollar emoji to your fanbase to receive direct cash transfers. It can mean high end artistic and gymnastic skill of a stripper, it can mean the aristocracy of sex work, Dita von Teese, rubbing shoulders with Hollywood. It can mean Jessy, teenage heroin addicted sex worker, risking her life every night, victim of ill circumstance, a girl who braves her destiny and doesn’t blame anyone. Why don’t we help her? If you, social justice warrior of the keyboard variety, really wanted to help sex workers, then you’d stop trying to “save” the sex worker millionaires and go and help this poor little girl who has no one. Go. Go now, and help her. Get in touch with the journalist, here is his Twitter, and find out how to donate money for her to exit the streets, get shelter, education and medical assistance to stop the addiction that fuels the need for low paid, high risk sex work. And stop trying to rescue me, from my lavish Edwardian furniture, beating the shit out of men with a gilded crop for more than your month’s salary. Pathetic.

Politicians are helping the wrong people. They’re interested in war and that when they’ve got kids sleeping in train stations.— Jessy, a really lovable girl with plenty of bad luck.

Moreover, why the firm boundaries? Since I own sexual features that make me desirable to men, whether I am willing or not, I get sexually objectified. You as a honest woman are prevented by “words” and “respectability” from turning what is basically a sexual asymmetry remnant of evolutionary pasts, into hard cash. I am not beholden to fictions, like God, or “reputation”. When a dude hits up my vanilla professional profile without a single sexy pic, but a professional business headshot, and asks “how u doin’ babe”, I won’t recoil in horror anymore; I’m sending him an invoice. That’s what men would do. But men, also, historically, trained women to NOT do that. So that they belong to the tribe, body and soul. Uterus and clitoris. Mind and matter.